Create a 3D video game device animation

In this short video you'll learn how to use spline objects, extrude objects and the powerful animation tools in the MoGraph module to easily create and animate a mobile video game device using Cinema 4D Lite.

To open up Cinema 4D Lite we simply need to be inside After Effects CC and go to File, New, MAXON CINEMA 4D File...

After Effects CC will then prompt you to set a location to save your new Cinema 4D file on your computer.

I'll just name this game_device.C4D and hit Save.

This will then launch Cinema 4D Lite.

Creating and manipulating splines, which are basically Cinema 4D's version of paths, is as easy as using Shape Layers in After Effects CC.

So under our Spline menu here you can see we have many of the same shapes that are available as Shape Layer shapes and much more.

So to create the main spline shapes that will make up our gaming device, we'll use just some Rectangle splines and some Circle splines.

And you can see on each of our spline objects we have some of the same features and options, that we do with After Effects CC Shape Layers.

So with Rectangles we have the Width and Height sliders as well as Rounding.

So you can check on the Rounding checkbox and then adjust the radius of that rounding.

Another parallel to After Effects CC is utilizing what's called a Spline Mask to combine two spline objects.

Now a Spline Mask works similarly to Pathfinder in Illustrator CC or Merge Paths on an After Effects CC Shape Layer.

We can add subtract or intersect different spline objects.

So here I'll add my two rounded rectangle splines and combine them together to form the directional pad element on our gaming device.

So I'll just go ahead and drag and drop both of these rounded rectangles and make them children of our Spline Mask.

And by default our our Spline Mask is set to A union B, which basically just adds the first spline to the second spline.

And you can see that we now have one spline created from those two rounded rectangles.

So here is our basic spline set up using rectangle and circle splines.

In After Effects CC a path by itself without a fill or a stroke will not show up in a render.

Similarly in Cinema 4D Lite a spline will not render until you generate 3D geometry with it.

So one of the ways we can actually utilize splines to create geometry is by making the spline object a child of a generator object or in our case an extrude object.

So the extrude object works similarly to extruding in After Effects CC, Illustrator CC or Photoshop CC by creating a 3D object from a 2D spline.

So to make the extrude object work upon or act upon a spline object we simply have to make the spline object a child of the extrude object.

And you'll see if I go into my Extrude options and go to the Object tab we have this Movement option here, which is basically the movement of the extrude in the X, Y and the Z.

So right now by default we have a Z movement or Z depth of 20 cm.

If I bring that up to 100, you can see that just deepens our extrude.

And if we want to have this movement or this extrude go in a certain angle, we can just adjust the X movement and the Y movement to get a type of sheer extrude.

But for now I'll just leave the movement in the X and Y to 0 cm.

You can also go into the Caps tab here and adjust the Caps and the Rounding.

So we can use what's called Fillet Caps to add a nice bevel to our extrude object.

So you can see how we made this nice sharp kind of chisel look on the edge of our extrude.

We can up the Steps to introduce more geometry and therefore smooth out those Fillet Caps.

And that's on the front and then on the back I can also increase the Steps to round out that back.

So on extrude objects the front and back face of the extrude object are known as the caps.

And the Fillet Caps or the bevel is known as the rounding.

So for this instance I'm going to just keep normal caps.

I don't want any rounding or anything like that.

And we can actually place multiple splines underneath one extrude object and have that one extrude object extrude all of the splines underneath it by going into our extrude object options and checking on Hierarchical.

Now since all of our splines share the same Z space, Z space of 0 cm, we're not going to see any of our individual splines here.

But if I adjust my directional pad and move this forward, you can see that now I'm moving that forward in Z space and we can now see that directional pad element.

By selecting our extrude object in hitting the C key, you can easily convert the single extrude object and break it into multiple extrudes for each individual spline.

So this is helpful for being able to adjust the Z position or the Z depth of each individual spline object.

Now let's give the 3D object a flat illustrative type of feel by applying very simple flat colors devoid of any diffuse shading as a material.

So I just want to go into my Display options here, go to Gouraud Shading (Lines), so we can actually see the lines on all of our geometry.

And then we're just going to double click in the Material manager here below to create a new material.

Now what I'm going to do is apply this on our game body extrude and just hit Render by clicking this button.

You'll see that we have some kind of diffuse shading going on here.

And what we're going to do is just flatten this out so it just looks flat 2D and illustrative.

So what I'm going to do is double click on my Material, go into the Material Editor, turn off the Color and the Reflectance that's holding the specular and just turn on the Luminance channel.

And when I do that and if I hit Render you can see that we now have this flat white material devoid of any type of diffuse shading or depth applied to our extrude object here.

So what we can do is just click on the color chip here and make this like a light bluish gray.

And what I want to do is just isolate this material and apply it to just the front cap on our extrude object.

So what I can do is utilize the selection options on our Material tag.

And if I type in C1, you can see that that actually stands for the front cap and that will limit that material to just that front cap.

And to designate the back cap, we'll just type in C2.

And that will apply our material on the back cap only.

So C1 and C2 are very handy shortcuts to just be able to apply a material to a front cap or a back cap of an extrude object.

So let's just quickly make another gray color.

So let me just make this slightly darker.

And with that first material on our object I'm just going to apply this dark gray material on top of this object as well.

And what you're going to see is if I hit Render we just totally overwrote that light gray material here.

So what's going on?

Well materials are layered from left to right, meaning that the leftmost material, our light gray material here, is applied first and then any materials to the right of it are applied on top of it.

Just like layers in Photoshop CC.

So to be able to make our gray Cap show through, we actually need to place it on the right of our gray material, so it's layered on top of our gray material.

So now if I hit Render you can see we have a nice type of 2D shading applied to our object by utilizing two shades of gray.

Now to animate our gaming device, we're going to utilize the powerful MoGraph module inside of Cinema 4D.

So what we're going to do is use these Effectors to animate our objects here, all the elements in our scene.

And we first need to use a Fracture object and place all of our objects we want animated underneath that Fracture object.

Now what the Fracture object does is allow objects underneath it to be affected by those Effectors and this basically built to pass on any animation attributes from Effectors down to its children objects.

So we have this Effectors fields here and if we just grab a Plain effector, which just affects Plain all Position, Scale and Rotation, you can see that with my Fracture object selected, you can see it already applied the Plain effector to my Fracture object.

If I dive into my Plain effector here, you can see why all of my objects moved up suddenly.

That's because the Position is checked on and the Y value is set to 100.

So what this Plain effector did is moved all the objects that is underneath this Fracture object and moved it up 100 cm.

So what we can do is actually use this to scale up all of our objects.

So I'll just go ahead and check on Uniform Scale.

So we can uniformly scale down the scale and X, Y and Z on our object to -1.

So just scale everything down.

We can then utilize a Falloff and actually visually control and animate falloffs to allow these objects to animate on.

So if I move this up and down you can see our falloff passing through our objects and basically scaling them up.

So then all we have to do is animate this effector, add a Random Effector to randomize the weight and how much the Plain effector is affecting all of those objects.

You can see we have a much more organic animation with that Random Effector randomizing the timing of how those objects are scaling on.

With our scene fully animated and saved we can jump back into After Effects CC.

Place our Cinema 4D file to our pre-made composition here, change Renderer from Software to Standard (Final) to get the full rendered image, RAM Preview.

So by bringing in our Cinema 4D file as a CINAWARE layer, we can easily composite our 3D elements with that Cel Shading from Cinema 4D and into our After Effects CC composition without ever needing to render anything out of Cinema 4D Lite.

Cinema 4D Lite is a great way to learn and explore the world of 3D.

With its intuitive workflow, low learning curve and its tight integration with Adobe After Effects CC, Cinema 4D Lite allows you to be an artist and get to creating.